Local regulations & Setbacks

I was contacted by the Masterton sales office today regarding our plans and CDC.
The sales office contacted the building inspector/certifier who will be issuing the CDC with a copy of our recently drawn plans.

It turns out that our front setback has to be 10m minimum and the Garage cannot be in line with the rest of the front building line. The garage needs to be pushed back by 1m. This sucks as I will lose a bit of space in the Garage and also our front portico. Kind of defeats the purpose of extending the garage out in the first place.
The sales office recommended we push the rear RHS of the garage back by 1m aswell.
This will help with the extra space but that area is mainly for rear access so it isnt greatly beneficial.
Also, I look around where we live and none of the other houses have had to do this.
Theres one place about 40m from me and the garage sits in front of the house by around 3m!

Also, because the house has been pushed back, we are now too close to the rear boundary which has a setback of 12m!!
In order to solve this, the sales office recommended I bring the rear wall of the home theatre in by 800mm. This is possible as the home theatre is quite large and should still fit our couch set in their ok.

Thankfully my block isnt any smaller as it would have probably caused a lot more problems with this design.

Bloody council and their stupid regulations. I cant beleive I pay them well with my hard earned money just so they can tell me what I can and cannot do on my own property. (end rant) :)

First Drawn Plans Received

Finally got our plans today. They are mostly good with only a few things left out which I will get on to straight away.
Its good to finally see our idea on paper at least.

Plans can be viewed here - http://photos.imageevent.com/kadepunk/personal/FINAL%20PLANS%201ST%20DRAFT%20EDITED.pdf

In the meantime....

Hi all.

Not a lot to report lately. Its been all quiet on the southern front :)

Have been in communication with the sales office in Batemans Bay and apparently the plans are just going into drafting (approx. 3 weeks after the plan prep fee was paid.)

I have clearly specified all the changes we require to the plans so fingers crossed, they will have it all sorted and we receive these changes included in the first draft. However, after researching other peoples experiences, I think not. But heres hoping.

We had the contour survey done about 1 week ago now. The guy doing it was a nice bloke. Traveled all the way down south to us from Nowra (around 2.5-3 hrs). He told me to expect the peg-out within the next week or two. Will be good to finally see Masterton stick something in the ground.

Also, our Basix checklist with external colours has been completed, along with the 149 planning certificate for council. So thats 2 small steps forward on councils long, steep and windy paper highway.

Inclusions

The Masterton promo at the time was if we chose the Fully Ducted A/C and the Mansion package, then we would be eligible for the free alfresco with a slab.
We ended up upgrading to the Platinum package as we felt we would have wanted a lot of the upgraded items from this package any way.

Heres what else we opted for:

Large single garage door in lieu of 2x  small garage doors with a pillar in the middle. We can only really see ourselves using the double garage for 1 car and have plenty of room to walk around the car. Hence the large single garage door.

6 stacker Alfresco doors. we plan on putting our Pool table in the great room and we like the idea of completely opening up the stacker doors to the alfresco.

Enviroseal wrap - helps insulate and provides a 4 week reduction period to length of the build - More Info

2740mm high ceilings and 2340mm high doors throughout.

Home Theater option.

2x colour matched whirly birds to vent roof cavity.

Recess nook/niche for ensuite and main bathroom (450mm x 450mm)

OTHER:

Cold water point to fridge space for ice maker.

Third coat of paint. As opposed to the standard 1 coat of undercoat and 1 coat of main coat.

BAL-29

Thought I would post up some of our costs that we incurred after determining that we live in a Bush Fire Attack level 29:
Thetotal for these costs came in at $11,768.00

Heres a breakdown of the costs and what we have to do:

Provide fire retardant sarking to tiled roof to have a flammability index of not more than 5 - $2981.00

Provide fire retardant mastic to all expansion joints in brickwork - $375.00

Provide ducting from a ceiling exhaust fan to external air in lieu of standard. (Single level Home) - $420.00

Provide aluminium framed with aluminium mesh insect screens to openable windows. screens to have a max aperture size of 2mm. (Excluding the Garage and any bifold windows if applicable). (14 windows) - $728.00

Provide aluminium framed security screens with aluminium mesh to the sliding doors. screens to have a max aperture size of 2mm (Excluding the Garage and any bifold doors if applicable). (6 doors) - $2144.00

Provide aluminium hinged security flyscreen door with aluminium mesh. screens to have a max aperture size of 2mm. (2 doors) - $940.00

Provide 5mm toughened glazing to all windows, sliding and hinged doors including entry frame sidelights - $2580.00

Provide weather strips or draught excluders to external hung doors - $180.00

Provide weather strips or draught excluders to garage doors (1 large and 1 small door) - $860.00

Provide spark guards to all weep holes and all sub-floor vents made from stainless steel mesh with max aperture size of 1.8mm - $450.00

Provide roof vents or external ducting to have a flammability index not greater than 5 with spark guards made from bronze or stainless steel mesh with max aperture size of 1.8mm - $110.00

External Colours

 Traditional Facade:

Bricks - PGH Summervilla Vanilla (Exposure Grade):

Roof tiles - Monier Horizon - Barramundi:

Gutters & downpipes - Colorbond Monument:

Fascias - Stone Beige:

Windows and sliding doors - Dowell Black satin / Night Sky:

Shed door - Gliderol Hampton in Stone Beige:

Front door - Hume Newington XN6 with Merbau stain:

Rear/Laundry door - Hume Joinery JST1 with Merbau stain:

So it begins....

Hi and welcome to our blog.

We are about to start a great adventure and I look forward to sharing the ups and downs with you all. My name is Paul, I live with my partner Sarah and My 10 yr old son, Kade in Mystery Bay on the south east coast of NSW.
We purchased our block of land here in April 06, hoping to build our dream home. Mystery Bay is a beautiful place (see background picture) and we have some excellent friends very close by and we can vision ourselves living here for at least another 20 years or so.
We plan on having more kids but want to build a larger home first. We loved M.B so much we used to camp on the block whenever we had the chance.

Camping back in 2007:

Approximately 4.5 years ago, we decided to move out of our home in a smaller town located about 20km from M.B. The house we owned was a 1957 fibro model and had been in my family for around 25 years. We were over living in the small country town and felt the calling to get to our block of land in M.B, on the coast.

We decided to renovate the house to spruce it up to sell on the market in order to help fund our building project. We also decided to rent a small house in M.B while we work on it and wait for it to sell.
As it turns out, the G.F.C hit literally the day after we listed the house on the market and a lot of other people decided to sell around the same time as us. Being a small town this was bad news for us.

A couple of years later, the house still hadn't sold. I always wanted to build a music studio/granny flat/cabin on our block after we built our main house. The block is 1157m2 so there is more than enough room to fit the 2 dwellings. So, as I had some $$ saved up, I decided to do things back-to-front and build the cabin first. This way we could get out of the renting game and start to get some use out of our block of land while we wait for our house to sell.

We decided on a small 2 bedroom transportable cabin which is 5.2m x 10.5m with a 5.3 x 2.5m verandah. The place is tiny but has just enough room to fit us in. We also purchased a shipping container to store a lot of our larger furniture in and I built a 3m x 3m colourbond garden shed which stores our mower, snipper, pushbikes chest freezer, dryer and a couple of dirt bikes + more.
The cabin was completed in Nov 2010 and we have been living in it since. Its a great little cabin, it has saved us a pocket in rent but we are sick of the major lack of room.

On and off, I had been scoping house builders and plans for the last few years.
I managed to narrow my search down to one design which is perfect for us and what we want now, and in the future. We decided on the Masterton Sirocco 7. It suits us to a "T" with large rooms throughout, open living with plenty of space for all of us and our belongings and our future kiddies.

The standard plan was great, with only couple of changes required.We decided to add in the 5th bedroom/study option, take Alfreso 1, rear roller door at the rear of the garage, extend the front of the garage to front building line. I altered the original plan with Microsoft paint to show exactly what we wanted.


Standard:

With changes:

Being on the coast and in the country, its hard for us to get to the city to look at display homes etc.. (we hate Sydney too).. so you can imagine how happy we were to discover that Masterton have a display home about 80km (approx. 1hr) from us, and to top it off, its the Sirocco 7.
I think we have walked through this display home at least 4 or 5 times now and have taken dozens of photos so I can stare at them on my computer. When seeing the house in front of us, it sealed the deal and we knew that this was exactly what we wanted.

Here's the best part: Finally, the house we were trying to sell actually settled on the 10th of February this year. We were beside ourselves as this meant we could actually start to move forward with our plan. I didn't muck around either. As soon as the 10th of February came and went, I was straight on the phone and the keyboard to everybody.

Here's whats happened so far:

SITE INSPECTION - 30.01.12

BUSH FIRE REPORT (BAL-29) - 06.02.12

DETAILS SENT TO SYDNEY FOR FIRST TENDER - 08.02.12

FIRST TENDER RECEIVED - 27.02.12

SECOND TENDER RECEIVED - 07.03.12

THIRD TENDER RECEIVED - 12.03.12

FOURTH TENDER RECEIVED - 13.03.12

PLAN PREP SIGNED AND PAID ($3.5K) - 14.03.12

POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS STATEMENT/AUTHORITY TO REFUND LEVY/NO ALLOWANCE SCHEDULE SIGNED - 21.03.12

So that's it up until the 22nd of March 2011. Our adventure continues............